Analog Color TV Wrap-Up--Some extra info

Ha-ha, all those weird skin tones bring back memories xD

A brilliant addendum to the previous videos! My head’s spinning; I like that in a video

back in the day PAL might have been superior, but these days when every display uses NTSC framerates (60, 30 & 24) even in Europe, PAL is just a nuisance to deal with.

You are actually talking normal speed here! So what happened in the last 5 years. Well, I'll find out because i just discovered your channel last week and am binging all of your videos! lol

I first saw a colour TV in a department store in the UK just before Christmas 1966. By late 1966 BBC2 was regularly broadcasting in PAL colour, though at the time the channel only showed 'trade test' films in colour. These allowed the retail trade to become familiar with the technology and enabled consumers to see colour TVs and to buy them before the official launch of colour on 1st July 1967. By spring 1967 several of the scheduled BBC2 programmes were also being broadcast in colour on an unofficial basis well ahead of the July launch date. But yes, it was indeed coverage of Wimbledon that marked the first official scheduled broadcast in PAL.

When I was in college, and taking a video production class, I asked one of the international students, who came from a PAL country, whether he preferred NTSC or PAL.

He preferred NTSC. "It looks more alive," he said. That is the higher frame rate at work, I presume.

I wonder if anyone had tried 4 color... like rgbg
Rgb but with an add green pixel...

I thought something happened to my TV, cause it is 14 years old.

You forgot to mention "People Are Lavender"! 😜
And of course there was the incompatible (and quite complex in comparison) SECAM as mentioned in other comments. As this wasn't enuff, there were multiple variants of PAL and SECAM.
This hodge-podge of standards was mainly politically motivated, as Eastern Europeans were discouraged from picking up Western PAL broadcasts and getting funny ideas. Of course they had very skilled and resourceful techies who were able to mod their SECAM tellies to pick up PAL broadcasts and watch Miami Vice. 😎

Incidentally, the discontinued 402-line standard in the UK was the Marconi. The UK replaced it with the PAL-I standard which used a modified sound carrier frequency.

When NTSC compatible color was approved, the "amplitude to phase conversion" impairment was significant in video amplifiers and video distribution equipment. Changes in amplitude would introduce a phase shift. This impairment wasn't a major issue for B/W video but was for color, because phase shifts change the hue displayed on the screen. If the hue control was adjusted to produce good color for bright objects, dimmer objects would have the wrong color.

AT&T's TD2 microwave radio was used to distribute network programming to affiliated stations. It had a significant amplitude to phase conversion impairment when first used to distribute color programming. Sometime later, engineers made a design change which greatly reduced the impairment, so as to no longer be an issue for color TV. The design change also allowed AT&T to carry more telephone calls on the same system.

PAL is more tolerant of amplitude to phase conversion and was, presumably, selected in Europe for that reason. In NTSC, the difference in the phase of the color subcarrier is 180° line to line and was deliberately chosen that way. The subcarrier oscillator completes 227.5 cycles per line, or 455 cycles per pair of lines. One cycle is split between each pair of lines. So, the phase does alternate line to line in NTSC as well as PAL, but the method of alternating the phase is different. Furthermore, NTSC doesn't cancel out minor phase shift impairments.

What caused the "Dot Crawl"?

Magic did not happen in 1965 actually it was 66 and because that was year that RCA's patent ran out.
RCA owned NBC so they had the most color shows because it was free for them and for others had to pay hefty licensing fees on every color broadcast and TV makers had to pay hefty fees on every set they made so maybe they had one high end model.
Free of that 66-67 was the first season all networks were full color in prime time and every set maker had multiple colors sets at much lower cost to consumer.
It wasn't magic or critical mass just the end of RCA's patent

I know this video is old but its like more than a few people in the comments here just never watched the video, lmao. Lots of people here are making the exact same arguments that you explicitly address.

I remember that our country in 1972 (a little late) just invented their own standard. And arguably is the best one. They just YOLO it and added PAL color burst to System M. Basically PAL at 60 Hz. The better color + more frames per second.

Its called PAL-M and only exists here, its also very much incompatible with anything else.

I find it exceedingly ironic that moving the frame rate from 30fps to 29.97fps was to solve an audio problem (interference between color subcarrier and sound carrier on broadcast signal). Once video technology started to be used in film post production that shift in frame rate came back to bite us all with a vengeance. This was first noticed with the use of time code (a frame numbering system that used hours:minutes:seconds:frames to count program, shot, scene length. It was noticed (for example) that a 60 min show had a time code duration that was 3 seconds too long. (30fp vs 29.97fps for video & 24fps vs 23.98fps for film on video). So, we came up with Drop Frame Time Code which "advanced the frame count from 29 to 01 instead of 29 to 00 at every full minute count except the 10s of minutes count" to make the time code count correct relative to stop watch time. That DFTC complicated the task of maintaining a frame accurate shot length count for editing purposes (did the shot transition a full 1 minute count or a 10s of minutes frame count). OK, so we just use Non Drop Frame Time Code (NDFTC) for length calculation simplicity and keep in our heads that DFTC gives accurate running times for the movie on TV and NDFTC gives accurate running times for the movie in the theater. Simple compramise? Not so when the use of digital audio came into use in film on video and video editing. If you want the audio sample rate of CD based digital audio to be evenly divisible by the video frame rate, you then have to slow the sample rate from 44.1Khz to 44.056Khz. Now you have to have digital audio gear that will handle that strange slower audio sample rate. You can get around that problem by locking the 44.1Khz sample rate to the 29.97 video picture rate (23.98 film picture rate) and do all your audio editing that way. Great, but not so fast. When you play the movie with digital audio in the theater (@ 24fps) you have to speed up the playback audio sample rate from 44.1Khz 44.144Khz. If you don't, your picture / sound sync will continuously slip until it is 3 seconds out of sync after 60 minutes of play time. Does that number sound familiar? You might say that modern theatrical sound is based on an audio sample rate of 48Khz not 44.1Khz. With 48KHz based digital audio you have exactly the same sample rate / audio sync problems. They are just moved to 47.952Khz / 48Khz / 48.048Khz. Now you have to accurately label the exact sample rate when locked to the exact frame for all your sound elements and trust everyone understands what all this means as they process your movie. "Fun" times!😮

Modern TV frame rates seem to be stuck in the color offset rates for no reason. Doesn’t 29.97 exist as an offset frequency to prevent interference from the audio subcarrier in the analog 6 MHz TV channel created by RCA for the American 525-line TV standard, and to be backward-compatible with TVs in existence in the 1940s and earlier? Since we no longer use analog TV, and digital does not need the color offset, why are we still using that instead of the whole number of 30? And instead of 60 fps, why 59.96? Instead of 24, why 23.976?
Can’t we ditch the color offset frequencies altogether and use the whole numbers 24, 30, and 60? Digital TVs can play the whole number frame rates with no problem, right?
China is still selling new cameras clocking in at the offset frame rates. Can we get the whole world to agree they’re no longer necessary and go to the hard whole numbers as a standard?

FINALLY!!!!!!!! SOMEONE DEFENDS US 60HZ NTSC PEOPLE!!!! THANK YOU!!!!!!

Hey! Those color dots in the color picture tube must be pixels! ;)

PAL regions also were the first to get 16:9 widescreen

Does anyone know: Did the NeXT CRT monitors use Trinitron or the same pattern as the iMac would later use?

Blud green imac

Germany started in 1967 or 1969 and each TV station could transmit in color, it took longer to change every content to color. They started with music shows, feature films and commercial spots and children content. When my family had color TV in the 1980's, the majority of content was in color, the only exception were older feature films and stock footage and in Easy Germany English lessons.

What about SECAM?

Sytem
Even
Crueler than the
American
Method?

There is ONE area in particular where NTSC excels and PAL does a horrible job: video games.
Ask any speedrunning community, the lower PAL framerate tends to really mess with and slow down games ported to it compared to NTSC regions. Like what you said happens with film, but with more consequences due to the interactive aspect. This is especially noticeable with older titles, as well as games where exact frame count is particularly important like fighting games.

"How could the first one be a mistake? They couldn't possibly have done more development instead of taking the very first thing!"

Maybe there should have ben mention of the early field sequential CBS color broadcasting system (which was incompatible with existing B & W TV's and was the reason it was not adopted).

ah thats why the crap 29,xxxx framerate exists.

Personally, I would have stopped at it, which was developed later, so it had advanced.

This is the first video I've ever had to slow down to 0.75x speed.

The best standard is France's SECAK with 825 lines (HD effectively), but still interlaced. So kinda like a higher res 720i ...weird hey!!!!!

I'll just say that Playing video games at 60 Hrz in NTSC>>>>>>>>> playing video games at 50 hrz in PAL 🤢

Best system was the German Telefunken PAL

NTSC had a low horizontal resolution. If went for an incompatible system the simplest would of been to triple-ish the horizontal scan rate so different lines for Red, Green, Blue. An entire one color phosphorous line must be easier to manufacture than lots of dots. Then horizontal resolution is unlimited. Using a TV as a monitor a black and white TV has high horizontal resolution so can display 80 columns of text while in color usually 40-64 characters depending on num horizontal pixels in a character and how much of the scanline is used. NTSC locking in low resolution to me is it's biggest weakness.

Instead of complicated phase detection what was wrong with simply transmitting RED, GREEN, BLUE, R G B R G B R G B. On B&W would average to brightness. For the future when technology got better R could become R1R2 to double horizontal resolution.

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PAL has disadvantages though, spatial color resolution is worse and the averaging created a less precise positioning of color in the vertical dimension. Secam is even weirder.

The PAL resolution however is better. But, I do not like the PAL movie speed-up. But, NTSC creates micro-stuttering with the 3-2 pulldown. But then. the PAL speedup means audio is pitched-up by a chromatic half-tone as well. Not ideal for audio.

I was wrong! I thought with my background and hobbyist research, this channel could not tell me something new about analogue television. But, reconstructing color our of monochrome artifacts? I know these artifacts from first-hand experience but would not think it is possible to derive the color from it. That is ... fantastic!

I will say, playing retro games on a pal tv with rgb scart really makes the colours pop, I love pal, grew up with pal gaming 😋

This may have been mentioned somewhere in six year's worth of comments already, and my apologies if I'm repeating it now:
B&W telecine recordings which retained color information are why we have at least one classic series episode of Doctor Who in color today. Episode One of "The Dæmons" was colorized in 1992 using such techniques.
A color test copy of that episode and a 5-minute segment from an episode of Tomorrow's World which discusses the process are included as extras on the DVD release of that story and the BD release of John Pertwee's second Doctor Who season. (That's season/series eight [8] of the classic era.)

Another solution would've been to offer double broadcasting, one at 625 lines for colour on UHF and keep the existing one at 525 lines for existing TVs on VHF on two different TV channels and wait for the 525 lines broadcasting to be phased out 10 or 15 years later. People with existing TVs would then have to buy a set-top box.

not gonna lie as soon as i rerecord over an tape (i live in Germany) the picture looks like had been directly transmitted from my camcorder directly into the TV. in other there is NO visible quality loss in picture nor audio even after playback thru RF or av

visibility of dot-crawl: have a look in yr piles of gear for a waveform monitor that lets you filter out the chroma & display it on its own. look at the variation in the amplitude. that's saturation. so yeah, the subcarrier will be 'louder' on screen where there's a lot of strong colours.
but there's another effect- if you don't filter out the subcarrier before the signal hits the electron guns.... if you leave the subcarrier sitting on top of the luminance signal.... some of it gets rectified at low luminance values because it dips below black level. this causes a slight black lift, in effect a gamma error.
question for the movie guys- we went with 25 fps for european tv, & 30fps for the US, because it minimised the flickering effect of electrical lighting & whatnot on screen. strobing, in other words. so why 24fps for movies? was it really just the economic trade-off between persistence of vision & the cost of the stock?

3:2 pulldown NOOOOOOOO!

No, the reason for the 1.5 MB bandwidth of the I signal and 0.5 for the Q signal is that a quadrature phaserelationship between two signals on the same carriercan be maintained only with sidebands both above and below the carrier frequency. As there is only 0.5 MB available above the carrier frequency, the Q signal must be kept to 0.5 MB bandwidth.